Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, January 13, 2004

On top of its military difficulties in Iraq, the Bush administration is caught in the embarrassing position of resisting calls of "democracy now" from Islamic clerics and former Baathists.

U.S. officials are digging in their heels after Iraq's top Shiite Muslim leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, stunned the administration Sunday by rejecting months of American entreaties to support a U.S. plan for a tightly controlled transfer of power to Iraqis by June. On Monday, American officials described al-Sistani's demands for full national elections in the coming months as impractical, and they indicated that they would make only minor revisions to their plan.

But al-Sistani's argument has received quiet backing from Iraqi government experts and some United Nations officials, making the U.S. position increasingly uncomfortable.

The standoff adds to the risk that Iraq's Shiites, who compose about 60 percent of the population but have remained generally quiet, could join the Sunni Muslim-dominated insurgency. It also is spurring a growing chorus of demands from sidelined Sunnis -- including former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party -- that they be allowed to fully participate in the elections.

There is much at stake. If the United States continues to insist on a carefully directed transition that excludes anti-American radicals, attacks on U.S. troops may intensify, many Iraqis and U.S. analysts say. But if the Americans allow elections, a hard-line Islamic government could result.

Either outcome would confound White House strategists' hopes to claim success in Iraq during this year's presidential election campaign.

"If the Americans obstruct democracy and elections, if they push the Shiites in a more radical direction, it will require a lot more firepower to keep Iraq under control," said Asad Abukhalil, a political science professor at California State University Stanislaus who is an expert on Shiite groups in the Middle East.

"It would take just one flier signed by Sistani, posted in Najaf and Karbala, to ignite all-out holy war against the Americans throughout Iraq," he said, referring to the sites of the holiest Shiite shrines.

Al-Sistani's final word Sunday was a blow to U.S. officials and members of the U.S.-appointed, 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, who had assumed that the cleric would bend to pressure and endorse the American plan. Even worse, from the U.S. perspective, was al-Sistani's demand -- which he had not previously expressed -- that any agreement for American-led forces to remain in Iraq be approved by directly elected representatives, rather than by the Governing Council.

The administration plan, announced Nov. 15, calls for the replacement of the Governing Council through a process of caucuses held in Iraq's 18 provinces, supervised by local U.S. military commanders who apparently will hold veto power to block candidates considered to be pro-Baathist or radical Islamist.

The caucuses will select new municipal and regional councils, which in turn will choose a transitional government that will take office by June 30. This government will write a constitution and will prepare for full national elections at the end of 2005.

Elections are opposed by most members of the Governing Council -- in part because most of them have no organized support base in Iraq and are totally dependent on American tutelage. Many council members and their fledgling parties could be wiped off the map in a free election, observers say.

But al-Sistani warned of increased instability if the Americans don't bend. "The planned transitional assembly cannot represent the Iraqis in an ideal manner," he said Sunday, adding ominously: "New problems will arise as a result of this that will only worsen the tensions in the political and security situation."

On Monday, U.S. officials rebuffed al-Sistani. "There is no electoral infrastructure in this country to ... institute direct elections immediately," said Dan Senor, spokesman for Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator in Iraq. "There are no voter rolls, no electoral districts. There is no history of direct elections in this country."

But that stance has been weakened dramatically by recent statements from Iraqi officials and U.N. experts, who say that credible elections could indeed be held by using the database of Iraq's food ration system to create voter rolls, as al-Sistani has claimed.

"The database is 99 percent accurate, and is extremely detailed, with full information about the ages of all Iraqis, and it has been repeatedly and exhaustively cleaned up of all irregularities and duplications," said Ahmad al- Mukhtar, a Trade Ministry official who is overall director of the ration system. "If you gave me one month and enough paper, I could open registration to anyone who was exiled, allow them to register, and then I would give you a complete electoral roll."

"The database is reliable and includes all the population in the (Kurdish) north," agreed Torben Due, director of the U.N. World Food Program's former Iraq mission, which oversaw the system for seven years until it was handed over to administrators of the U.S.-led coalition in November. "There were no exclusions because of political reasons."

Officials of the U.N. elections division say any elections in Iraq would require about six months of intensive, U.N.-supervised preparations -- probably not the two years that American officials claim as a minimum.

While U.S. attention has been focused on Shiite insistence on elections, similar demands have begun to come from Sunnis. A new nationwide Sunni shura, or council, formed last month to unite Sunni factions, has joined the "elections now" camp, apparently viewing democracy as the Sunnis' only way to regain some semblance of the power they held under Hussein.

The vast majority of the 11,800 Iraqis now imprisoned by the U.S. military are believed to be Sunni. Tens of thousands of former Baathists have been fired from their government jobs, and Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi, a hard-line anti-Baathist, said new measures announced Sunday would cause another 28,000 ex-Baathists to be fired from their government and private-sector jobs.

If U.S. commanders exclude these people from the caucus procedure -- or from general elections -- an uproar would ensue, said Sheikh Moayad al- Noaimy, the leader of the Abu Khanifa Mosque, Baghdad's leading Sunni institution.

"This Governing Council is not accepted by all the Iraqi people, and if the Americans insist on choosing a new government in the same way, as they have said, it also will be rejected," he said. "The problems that we all know about will continue. Elections are the only solution."

"The question of Sunnis is key to all this," said Bathsheba Crocker, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies who participated in a Pentagon-sponsored study in July that criticized the U.S. governance of Iraq. "... The United States is going to have to do much better at bringing Sunnis into the fold, and elections are one way to do this."